ZIAM ONE-SHOTS (BOTTOM LIAM)

looking at you (seeing forever)

Author: weareonceinalifetime

Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2663969

Summary:

Liam's heart squeezes painfully, because that's just so quintessentially Zayn. He's out celebrating the completion of his big paper, and he's thinking of how to make his youngest sister happy. It's sweet and adorable and wonderful.

It's why Liam's in love with him.

The realization hits him like a punch in the gut, knocking the breath out of his lungs. All he can do is watch as Zayn pays for his turn on the ring toss and lines up his shot, his brow furrowed in concentration, his bottom lip caught between his teeth. The light catches the sharp edges of his profile, his eyelashes a dark sweep against his cheekbones.

Liam's in love with him.

***

Or the one where I wrote the fluffiest fluff I could inspired by Liam's Night Changes teaser.

Liam swears all he did was tap lightly on the front door of Zayn's apartment, but the knock that echoes in the stairwell makes him jump as if it were a gunshot. He shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his coat, teeth worrying his bottom lip. This is a bad idea, probably. Definitely, actually. This is a terrible idea, and the fact that Louis had said it sounded good when he'd asked him about it should have tipped him off. This is going to be a disaster, and he's going to embarrass himself, and he should just turn around and leave now.

"Liam!" Zayn says eagerly as soon as he opens the door, and Liam looks up and catches sight of him, all soft and rumpled with his hair messy and his glasses sitting slightly askew on his nose, and that's it, he's a goner. He won't be able to walk away from this even if he tries. "Come in."

"Actually," Liam starts, shifting his weight from his left foot to his right nervously, "I was hoping you could come out."

Zayn just looks at him, so Liam squares his shoulders and hurries on, the words tumbling out of his mouth and over each other. He wonders if Zayn can hear how anxious he is. "I mean, you finished your senior seminar paper, so I was thinking we could go celebrate. Or we could stay in. Whatever you want, because you're the one who's graduating, I just thought—"

"Liam," Zayn interrupts, his voice bright with laughter, "of course I want to. Just give me a minute to change, yeah?"

Liam grins, following Zayn into the apartment and shutting the door behind him. Zayn disappears into the bedroom and Liam takes a seat on the couch, pulling his phone out of his pocket and fiddling around with it just to have something to do while he waits. There's a text from Leigh-Anne asking if she can borrow his notes from their bio lecture, and three snapchats from Niall that he's a bit afraid to open knowing Zayn could walk back into the room at any moment. Instead he opens up Instagram, scrolling through his feed a few times and liking Harry's picture of a banana with googly eyes glued to it, captioned, "college art class".

He's hideously nervous, which is ridiculous because this is Zayn, his best friend, his favorite person in the whole entire world. This is no big deal, just a little best friend outing because in a few short weeks Zayn will be graduating early and moving out of his campus housing and into a real flat, and things will never be quite the same again. It's fun, is all. It doesn't have to mean anything, except for how Liam wants it to.

"Ready?" Zayn asks, reappearing. Liam stands to greet him, and suddenly he forgets to breathe.

Zayn is always frustratingly attractive. It's just a fact about him, like the fact that he loves his sisters and can be vain about his hair and likes to sleep and doesn't always follow every tenet of his religion perfectly but has more faith than anyone else Liam knows. He's never seen Zayn look anything less than incredible, which is why he shouldn't be so blown away by the sight of him in a simple dark coat and jeans and black boots. He's styled his hair, leaving it mostly down but making it look less fluffy and more artfully tousled, and there's a hint of stubble lining his sharp jaw.